Book News: Politician's Story Of Growing Up Poor Wins Ondaatje Prize

Alan Johnson's This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood describes life with his mother and sister in public housing in London's North Kensington neighborhood.

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/ Getty Images

Originally published on May 20, 2014 8:36 am

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Former U.K. Home Secretary Alan Johnson has won the Ondaatje prize, an annual £10,000 award for "a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place." His memoir This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood, describes his origins in the poor London neighborhood of North Kensington, in public housing with his mother and sister, a place of "peeling plaster, rotten window frames and cracked panes." Prize judge Jenny Uglow called it "a scrupulous but moving memoir of a particular area of London, with its boundaries, streets, people and poverty — you can see, and almost smell every room — which also captures the elusive spirit of place that imprints itself on a child, and is never forgotten." Johnson has held a variety of cabinet positions and was once considered a contender for the prime minister's job.

Rivka Galchen talks to Gawker about the experience of writing her new book: "The great thing about a first novel is that you really don't feel bad that the main person you are trying to keep amused is yourself. Writing a second book I found that I still wanted to mostly attend to whatever seemed like the stories' inner logics, but there was more of the sense that I was brushing my teeth in public. Or Q-tipping. Either way, something that is relatively private, if not excruciatingly private."

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Joshua Ferris talks to The Paris Review about the difficulty of naming characters: "Names generate meaning in a short amount of space — they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level."